by Jameson Draper
To call it “unseasonably hot”, I thought, as I peeled off my flannel, would be a lie. In Baltimore, early October temperatures commonly surpass eighty degrees these days. It was opening night of Baltimore’s best film festival, New/Next, and it was one of those balmy October evenings. Though the ominous portents of a hot fall night hung over the heads of all attendees— more out-of-staters came to the fourth year of New/Next than any year prior, a sign that in a spiraling industry, the state of indie cinema is perhaps blossoming more than ever— it was actually the perfect setting for the night’s opening film, Marnie Ellen Hertzler’s Eternity One, her second feature, a years-in-the-making documentary about a family on Tangier, an isolated Virginia island on the Chesapeake Bay that is literally sinking into the sea.
A meditation on love, dreams and the steadfast and desperate grasp for normalcy in the face of palpable climate change, Hertzler juxtaposed it with interspersed shots of transhumanists at a convention in Madrid (if you don’t know what transhumanists are, please view Billy Graham’s Lausanne Movement’s definition, which says more than it could ever intend: “Transhumanism seeks to create a hybrid between humans and machines that will result in an evolved species of human beings.”) They are people who live in safety and wealth, but people who are so terrified of their own decay that they greedily turn to crackpot science in an effort to become part machine and live forever. Backdropped by an ethereal score from Beach House— Baltimore locals— the juxtaposition is bizarre, severe, profound; how does it stand that people in imminent danger could live happier lives than those with enough money in their pocket to build sex robots and attempt to dodge death?
Perhaps the ultimate answer lies in the importance of human connection in the face of the depraved techno-plutocracy.
The mission statement of Eternity One can double as the mission statement of Eric Allen Hatch, New/Next’s director of programming. Throughout the weekend, this was the connecting theme of all the films I saw.
“We are all symptoms of the tech oligarchy,” said director Joshua Z. Weinstein, whose New York neo-realist digital desolation epic Here I’m Alive (which screened on Friday) concerns a collection of five wayward people in the dark underbelly of the city. A shut-in agoraphobic Discord moderator, a gay sugar baby, a Victoria’s Secret influencer, a Venezuelan migrant DoorDasher and a woman trying to pave her way out of a shelter through an online reality show try to make ends meet and (perhaps delusionally) trying to attain whatever the American Dream even is nowadays through digital labyrinths and harebrained cons. Though their choices are ill-advised, their goals are pure; the Discord moderator wants to help people’s mental health, the Venezuelan delivery driver his papers to see his kids, the unhoused woman a house, et cetera.
I nodded my head obligingly in the back row of the theater when Weinstein called us “symptoms”, perhaps a dehumanizing noun but accurate nonetheless; I had spent the previous night at the opening afterparty finagling as many free drinks as I could, meeting people whose names I should remember, but, as I attempted to recount them on the long and still-hot walk home, could not (I chalked it up to digital brain fry and nitrous oxide consumption in my college days.) When I went home and scrolled the social media apps that I had so craved after a day of phonelessness, I thought maybe the two were connected. In the morning, before hitting the festival, I tried to fix a drain leak beneath my bathroom sink and only made my generational shame worse. As I saw tepid and vile water spurting out of the old pipes of my ancient house, I thought to myself: I am a Zoomer, and I am incompetent. I felt hopeless as I walked to the theater and though I eventually lost myself in some fantastic programming, the humiliation of ineptitude intermittently reared its ugly head. So I smiled when, to close his Q&A, Weinstein mentioned pure humane hope for his downtrodden subjects: “It is not the end for any of these characters. In the future, they will be OK.”
It was an apt bookend of the first full day of the festival, a day chock full of revelatory features and shorts that showed glimmers of hope for us all. The Maryland & DMV narrative shorts program was a necessary local showcase in a festival struggling to retain its regionality. Patrick Elmore’s Memorabilia is a story about a kid whose idolatry of a football icon gives him a welcome escape from his small American town that somehow exists outside of time (there are no phones and he clicks through channels on a tube TV, yet throws “ragers” and drives cars from the new millenia.) There is a resonance to his adulation, for so many of us boys elevated athletes to demigods simply because we had nobody else. On the flipside, Dennis Chan’s Magic Championship Wrestling Presents: The Return of Hide Kimura! is a heartwarming hyperrealist tale about the moral corruption of a performance-based profession but puts forth a sound argument that you can always go home again, a short film well-executed and beautiful in its idealism.
Fatima Wardy’s White Musk was a highlight of the local narrative shorts, a film about family and death, and the flawed transcendence of filial love. The words divulge a certain reticence, a particular evasion of vulnerability— but words lie, as Wardy shows us plainly. In the smallest movements of the eye, the most minute shifts in body language, we see love bleed from the teenaged Hiba as she takes care of her dying mom, a mother full of restrained love who hates to show her own weakness. Wardy knows that the human face and the human hands are the most profound subjects, so we see through backwards glances, long gazes and braiding hair the most pure and simple acts of love, the acts of love we see in dreams when we sleep, acts of love that betray a truth words can never touch— a cinematic language in its purest form. Wardy is a filmmaker to keep an eye on, and one I hope makes a feature-length work sooner rather than later.
Friday’s highlight, though, was Marine Atlan’s La Gradiva. Some great writing has already been done by Alex Lei about her debut film, Daniel, and Mathuson Anthony’s review last week here at Michigan City does La Gradiva the full-length justice it deserves. The film was a devastating and moving story about adolescence and grief and the excavation of our past. To mine deep into ourselves and into our own history is enlightening if terrifying and often devoid of the meaning we seek. At each turn we believe the things that are happening to us are the most important moments of our lives. Maybe they are, but we always look back on our old selves with shame and embarrassment; Atlan tells us there is no glory like persistence. Her humanism shines through this work; a group of high schoolers take a field trip with their Latin class to the ruins of Pompeii, and through their sometimes cruel and stupid actions we see the people and the heart behind them; we feel empathy and love for the complex existence we share. The collocation of Pompeii, a place where everything became permanent and stopped forever, with the very transient and impermanent fabric of the lives we watch unfold is stark. We get the sense that maybe this was the wrong place to send a group of kids who need to know now more than ever that it is not the end of our story. In La Gradiva, Atlan posits that our collective memory is an oft-trodden path from which we mine our future.
Friday night, I bounced from the afterparty early. The headache I’d nursed all day was likely not because of the weather, I realized, but because I was still getting over a cold when I drank a putrid mixture of booze the night before. I walked home congested, hammers in my skull, so quiet my girlfriend (who came to a few films with me) thought I was angry. No, I said. I was just thinking of all the ways we hold ourselves back from connections we so desire. And also in excruciating pain.
I woke up Saturday in significantly improved health. It turns out that if you drink more water than beer and breathe tobacco-free air, mornings are easier. That was a stroke of luck for me: Saturday was the best day of the festival.
I got off to a slow start and moseyed over to the Charles in the early afternoon. In a monastic fugue state, I left my cigarettes at home. There was a light drizzle and temps were cooler; it finally felt like autumn. And the DIY: Baltimore and Beyond shorts block with which I started the day was a delectable hors d'oeuvres of cinema’s present state.
It quickly became clear to me that the shorts programming of New/Next is its hidden gem. For all the great features, the shorts are where one gets the most concentrated messaging from the programmers and pieces that most push the limits of the form. And the stylization is varied. The program oscillated effortlessly between sentiments sincere and satirical.
Take, for example, 1957 E Joppa Road, Corey Huges’ Google Street View tour of angst through a Baltimore County Micro Center looking for GPU in the midst of a memory crisis. As the terror mounts, we are forced to reckon with the likelihood that all our brains are fried. Or take its follow-up, A New Frontier, Caroline Symons’ visual album that plays like an art installation, a wordless compilation of public helicopter feed footage in Los Angeles that starts with police chases and ends up at the Dodgers’ championship parade, scored by a transcendent and larger-than-life Brain Club song by the same name. It is succinct and simple, but becomes a revelatory and sincere reflection on the media we consume and questions why we consume it.
Though DIY has an air of experimentation to it, there were some accessible films in this section, namely Lincoln Robisch and Zachary Ruchkin’s FREAK Accident, a hilarious comedy of errors. Maryland Renaissance Fest freaks in full garb driving a Tesla on autopilot accidentally run over a squeegee boy they don’t have the money to pay. The mere setup makes the short flow effortlessly, and for those who enjoyed it, good news: I have it on good authority their next film is set to be longer, but the crash will be worse, and the problems will snowball larger.
The best of the DIY shorts, though, was the bitingly dissociative GANGSTALKER!, Austin-by-way-of-Baltimore filmmaker Jake Binstock’s short that isn’t actually about gangstalking but rather a reptilian sent from some other realm to take down incels. For all the nomenclature of modern conspiracy theorists, it’s clearly steeped in the tradition of grand delusions; thanks to the frantic editing of Michael Lentz, the entire film feels like a sheer break from reality, dripping with microplastics poisoning, turning the monotonous quietude of a place as unremarkable as Cumberland, Maryland into a land teeming with evil, an indictment of mankind that would make William Gass proud. It is a film of our time, and though I won’t spoil it, I don’t think I can ever look at iCarly the same again.
My head spun as I left the theater that afternoon. I was exhilarated and needed a debrief, so I grabbed a sandwich next door, a pack of cigarettes from the gas station (apparently one morning of fresh air was good enough for me) and a drink at Club Charles, a two-level dive laden in red which lay directly across the street from the theater.
The decompression was well needed, for Saturday night was the peak of the entire weekend. First was The Tower, directed by Auden Lincoln-Vogel and Philip Rabalais. It’s about punk music, pig farmers, planned bombs and pondered towers. It’s an ensemble slice-of-life that illumines a small Iowa town in a spiritual crisis, living by tenants of old in a world that no longer exists, a barren land anew.
The Tower is an achievement worthy of its lofty taxonomy. It draws comparisons to Linklater’s Slacker for its vignettes of an overlooked city and Altman’s Short Cuts for its poetic and loosely resonate moments between a cast of singular characters in one town that are otherwise unfamiliar with each other’s existence. But any comparison does this film a disservice; it has its own DNA. This is postmodern Americana at its finest.
In a world where the internet makes everything digital monosyllabic noise, The Tower breaks through for its unapologetic regionality; it is more important than ever to show places as they are, undiluted by the static. From the opening footage of this film (a man on the roof of a car rolling cigarettes as his driverless old red truck careens into the fields) to the close (a tender multigenerational moment in an old living room with wood-paneled walls catching the warm afternoon sun), this movie is a love letter to a place beyond hope that burns images in your brain. I’d compare it to Gummo if I was being reductive here, but I said I wouldn’t do that. It's got more heart, and a more poignant narrative.
Interspersed with wayward kids escaped from home and a freshly metaphysical layer about the act of making the movie itself, The Tower is not just an ode to modern dirtbag heartland working class ephemeras in a place outside the watchful eyes of God, it is a tribute to the act of filmmaking as salvation, a valediction to the ripped fabric of a lost world, the culmination of that existential anxiety that marked the festival’s overarching programming.
The following feature, Jack Auen and Kevin Walker’s Chronovisor, not only hammered home New/Next’s worldview but was also the most anticipated film of the weekend. Whispers borne through the neighborhood all weekend contained adjectives like “original”, “generational” and “best”. The New York Times’ Brandon Yu charmingly termed it a “unique little marvel”. And a marvel it is, indeed, of budget filmmaking, but also of accessibility: this is the one movie from the festival I’d show my father.
Chronovisor is a story about the past, but is really about the present, as all great things are. This Borgesian film is about a polyphonic professor who obsesses over an old conspiracy theory (which a quick Google search tells us is real)— that a midcentury Benedictine monk discovered a way to transmit images from the past. The problem is that those images also came with the memories, too. The monk claimed to see Sophocles debut Antigone and the crucifixion of Christ. This crackpot conspiracy would have been swept totally into the dustbin of history if not for the Vatican’s desperate attempt to dismantle evidence of it ever existing, an act shrouded in hermetic secrecy and deception. So, of course, in the spirit of Zodiac and All the President’s Men, the filmmakers decided to blend an academic research narrative with a miasmic drama of quietly epic proportions. Though I do wish we had more insight into the interiority of our main character, Béatrice Courte (played incredibly by behavioral science professor Anne Laure Sellier in her first acting role), her obvious mental spiral does hearken back to the great performances of obsessive researchers in cinematic history.
Filmed in 16mm and mostly occurring inside the haughty and hallowed halls of the American education system (until some incredible exterior shots in a small Portuguese village toward the end), this is a movie actually about the desecration of memory and time. I was shocked that nobody in the post-film Q&A wondered if this movie was a greater allegory than it let on. At a certain point— according to the lore— the creator of the Chronovisor device, Father Ermetti, had to hide the machine from the world because, while the transmission of memory in images was religious for some, others could not handle it; “It doesn't only show past events, but also the memories of the people who were present, which then meld into the minds of the viewers.”
In short, people were flooded with real images and memories, inundated to the point where they could not remember which memories were their own and which memories were acquired. All I could think about was how that is the perfect allegory for artificial intelligence and how we, as a society, are experiencing a never-ending collective break from reality.
Speaking of a collective break from reality, the final film of the night, Leland Nally’s haunting documentary Dwarf Neon Mayfield, spoke with raw vulnerability about what a natural disaster in a forgotten land can do to a people. Perhaps the darkest entry of the festival, it was not without a sliver of light; through a series of vignettes from the three namesake towns of the film, all places in Kentucky yet to recover from a deadly tornado, we meet a series of forgotten folks searching for meaning and hope in a place so devoid of any possibilities. It’s a documentary about delusion. Not delusion as a detriment to society (for we already know that), but delusion as a powerful tool to escape a grim reality. Many of the residents of Dwarf, Neon and Mayfield that have survived the tornado have fallen deep into religion, conspiracies or communes with the stars; in a land older than the rings of Saturn and consistently forgotten in these post-capitalist Sodom and Gomorrahs, how can they not seek meaning in the stars?
Floored by the day that was now behind me, I danced and sweated and drank the night away across the street at the afterparty DJ’ed by Baltimore legend Dan Deacon. I stood outside at the end of the night among throngs of moviegoers and filmmakers on the packed sidewalk of Charles Street indiscriminately passing out darts like a film nerd Robinhood. I walked home at three o’clock and thought to myself if the festival had ended that way, I’d be satisfied.
But the final day still lay ahead. I woke up with a pounding headache in place of a voice, and planned to take it easy with three features and no shorts. At least that was my intent; the opener on Sunday was the best film of the day, but also perhaps the heaviest of the whole weekend, not recommended for someone trying to “take it easy.” Sandra Wollner’s Everytime, a harrowing meditation on grief as a transcendent experience, opens quietly on a Berliner family of three: a mother, a teenaged daughter and a younger sister. They live a normal life until it is thrown into disarray the night before a family trip to Tenerife when Jessie, the teenaged daughter, falls off a roof to her death after a night of partying with her boyfriend. It is the most chilling scene I’ve seen in years; totally at odds with the calm, benevolent orange sunrise before the city rises, we watch Jessie’s body freefall like a ragdoll in utter silence. Cinematographer Gregory Oke (who also worked on Aftersun) then moves his camera quietly along the treetops and through the dense German city— life moves on.
But it’s the rest of the film that is truly affecting. In a Q&A to come later in the day, director Alexandre Rockwell said (in so many words) of his film The Projectionist that grief becomes powerful; there’s almost pleasure in attacking it head-on. Grief only weighs you down when you refuse to acknowledge it. Prescient enough, I found that his meditation on grief applied even more to Wollner’s film than his own. In her director's statement, Wollner says that our departed loved ones stay with us past death. Perhaps what Wollner means is that their lingering presence is embodied through grief, or maybe the wind. There’s an overwhelming feeling in this movie that the memory of a lost loved one hangs heavier than those who are with us in the flesh. It’s haunting. When you add in the neural psychosis of technology, you get an added layer of spectrality: our loved ones are gone but we can hear their voices, watch their faces, read their old thoughts— we can even text their phone. How do we escape?
Ella, the mother of the story, does her best to move on, but realizes eventually that she must break free of the ignorance of grief; she takes that ever-delayed trip to Tenerife on a whim, taking along her surviving daughter and Jessie’s old boyfriend. What ensues is a kaleidoscopic series of chimeras, towing the line between reality and dreams, at times diving straight into hallucinations. We are left with confusion by the movie’s end: did the younger daughter die in Tenerife? Are we supposed to believe that the young girl they found is an analog for the dead, or the dead daughter herself?
Ultimately I don’t think it matters; what we see is exaltation through the exercise of exposure. The pain of facing our grief is acute, but it doesn’t break us down over the long run like compartmentalization does.
Reeling from Everytime, I expected the remainder of the final day to go by in a blur. I was tired; it had been a long weekend. I checked my fantasy football scores and I was losing in all my leagues. I had totally forgotten football was even on, which if you know me, you know is very out of character.
But Rob Rice’s Ponderosa in the afternoon slot was the most baffling film of the weekend; its sheer mystique kept me focused. An indictment of our world at-large, it takes place in a small American town that maybe hasn’t realized the rug has been pulled out from under us yet— at least not the older generations, who still believe that work gives us our identity and that there is something truly fulfilling about carrying out capitalism on a tiny scale. But this film suggests that, deep down, maybe they do, and they just can’t admit it. Zeke, played by Jack Dylan Grazer, our pessimistic Zoomer, is trying to be convinced by an older man, George (played wistfully and with depth by Bill Camp), to join some vague cabal, something bigger than himself. But it becomes increasingly clear that George doesn’t believe in it himself, and is lost. We are all part of a lost world, but maybe only some of us know it. Set to an old western Americana soundtrack, we watch our aimless characters move through empty ghost spaces of America’s past (old lodges, dilapidated buffets) and new palaces of soullessness (identical housing developments, badly decorated and poorly made).
Compared to other heartland films screened at New/Next, it feels just as misanthropic about America as it does the people in it. I am a firm believer that the people in this country are not the problem, but the symptoms, as Here I’m Alive’s Weinstein noted earlier in the weekend. Ponderosa works well as a commentary on the irreconcilable differences between generations and how we view work in regards to our collective identities, but it is a hopeless movie, perhaps too hopeless on the scale it exists. And though its mind-bending narratives go a lot of different ways, I would have liked Rice to explore some of the quietly moving moments more.
After somehow squeezing in the purchase and preparation of a chicken dinner in two hours, I made my way back to the Charles for closing night. The film was the aforementioned The Projectionist by Rockwell, at this point a bonafide independent film legend. To call his newest movie a “feel good” story is probably reductive, because it’s a story about how the system failed a man his whole life, a man who now feels like he did everything wrong and is hoping for salvation in his old and lonely age, but it does feel good. It’s a redemptive story of the power of humanism, and is totally driven by Vonnie Curtis-Hall’s powerhouse performance. Rockwell shot the film in black and white for this very purpose, to show his eyes, his hands, the lines in his face, his depth of expression— it almost feels like this film was built as a showcase for Curtis-Hall’s face as an art exhibit. And if it wasn’t already clear, Rockwell made it so during his energized Q&A before everyone poured out of the theater— myself included— for the final afterparty.
Though I could have fallen asleep on the street then and there, I somehow picked myself up for one last night to close out the festival and say my goodbyes. Maybe it was the adrenaline of finishing my first fest; maybe it was that I checked my phone once more and the tides had turned and I was winning all of my fantasy football games; maybe it was the cold fall breeze all of us Baltimoreans welcomed with exasperated and open arms; but I found myself drinking again. And just before the closing bell, against my best efforts, I shamed myself for the first time: in a small nook of Club Charles, beneath those red and unbecoming lights, I learned how to shoot threes, a dice game, and lost five consecutive hands, totally wiped of all my cash.
But something about it no longer mattered; I was beyond embarrassment. I had watched a weekend full of fantastic art. I could see the future.
****
Jameson Draper hails from Detroit but lives in Baltimore. He edits fiction at Michigan City Review of Books and bruises at BRUISER. He lives with his girlfriend and their two cats. He loves Negronis and tinned fish. You can follow him on Twitter @jamdraper.